EduPills, most innovative project of Open Expo 2017

Open Expo is an organization that promotes the adoption of open source software and curates relevant projects that use open source applications in the realms of business, education, health and the list goes on.

Once a year, they gather to celebrate the Open Awards, in which they acknowledge the efforts of some projects regarding the adoption or creation of open source software as part of their activity.

This is where EduPills comes into place. The app has been technologically developed using open source frameworks. INTEF (National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training), organization responsible for the app, focused on deliver microtraining pills to teachers. Through this app, the user can read and interact with the app about ideas, methodologies or pieces of advice that might be useful to try out during the class.

The app is comfortable, because the user can complete a pill in a five or ten minutes span. But also, the educational relevance of this app is huge. The content of the app is all based on the Common Digital Competence Framework for Teachers. Every single pill inside the app aims to develop a part of this Framework. Why is this important? Because it is actually rendering this huge Framework document into something tangible and easy to consume and deliver.

As part of the team that helped build the app, this award is a great honor and makes me feel proud.

If you feel like trying out yourself the app, you can download it from http://edupills.educalab.es/. The UI is both in Spanish and English, but the content is in Spanish.

But it wouldn’t be fair to end this post without discussing some other things that happened during the Open Expo fair. Montserrat Boix was granted an award for her career and initiatives in bringing open source software and women together. When she was at the stage, she wondered why there were all those logos and computers from Microsoft all over the place when Open Expo is all about open source. A huge applause came after that, troubling the staff, since Microsoft was one of the sponsors of the fair.